October 3, 2011

Posted by ANDY aka GHoooSTSDo you like podcasts? What about Commander? Then you seem to have stumbled upon the right website because this is a PODCAST about COMMANDER! It’s like peanut butter and chocolate, but you can’t eat it and it (probably) won’t give you diabetes in large quantities! CommanderCast S4E3 is jumping off NOW!

This week’s Tactical Podcasting Team roster consists of myself as squad leader (throwing WAVE after WAVE of my own men into the meat grinder), getting backup from Byron and Justin with special VIP Cassidy Silver on loan from TCGPlayer.com to help us infiltrate the deepest recesses of EDH wisdom and bring back these pearls for your personal benefit. However, in a new twist, this week we also discuss the possibility of you taking yourself off the rear-line support staff and joining myself and many others on the front lines of Commander content production. I’d love to see this segment end up inspiring at least one blog or something, because there’s always room for more people in this Internet EDH game.

But of course, that’s not our only topic. With the help of Mr. Silver, we provide an hour and a half of pearls here, many of which revolve around us sharing our personal failures as Magic players and as men in general. It’s epic. …not really.

Anyway, show notes and pertinent links below. Enjoy.

SHOW NOTES

00:00 to 03:37: Intro: It’s CommanderCast! What is this show about and who’s on it? In case you didn’t know, we’re going over it again.

03:48 to 18:31: Put Yourself Out There: Whether it’s writing, videos, or sick beard paintings, a lot of people have ideas on how they’d like to contribute to the online Commander presence but sometimes they need a bit of a push to actually start posting things. Hopefully this is the swift kick in the ass that gets somebody out there going. We discuss our own experiences publishing content, how we got started, and provide some advice to anybody inclined to begin posting stuff for trolls to tear apart online.

18:43 to 34:26: The Social Contract’s Relevance: While Commander is often promoted as being a social format, one of the biggest controversies in the wake of the it’s growth is the place of socially imposed limitations on the format, especially as more and more players are taking the social game to antisocial contexts. We talk about whether we still see the social contract as a relevant element of the EDH experience and how we see it panning out in the future.

STRATEGY SEGMENT

34:41 to 1:02:03: Archetype Rundown: Tribal Goblins: Some people think goblins are too small and produce too much card disadvantage to be any good in Commander. Those people are assholes, so who cares what they think? Here we’re looking at the tribal goblin decks one can build in EDH, talking about how your Commander influences the deck, some general strategies, and why you should bother playing something awesome like Goblins instead of something boring like… almost anything else.

1:14:04 to 1:30:55: Disasters in Design: Sometimes you build a deck but it’s a stinky, poopy mess. Don’t even fuck around, we’ve all done it. The difference is you probably don’t reverse-gloat about it to anybody willing to listen unless you’re one of the four tools on this podcast. This week we have a dicsussion on why our bad decks were bad and the lessons we tried to learn from it (maybe we didn’t learn anything at all!).